THE UR GETS TO REAP THE PEACE DIVIDEND:

The Gates Budget (Dov S. Zakheim, June 2009, American Spectator)

Gates first advertised his inclinations in a major Foreign Affairs article that appeared while he was still George W. Bush’s secretary of defense. He argued that the Cold War rationale underlying the procurement of major weapons systems had been overtaken by events, and that the military should reorient itself—and its programs and budgets—to the demands of fighting “irregular” wars that were likely to confront it for the foreseeable future. Consistent with that view, Gates fired the secretary of the Air Force and the service chief of staff, ostensibly over a nuclear weapons snafu but actually because they resisted the acceleration of programs to acquire unmanned aerial vehicles critical to operations against terrorists and insurgents but which threatened the primacy of piloted aircraft.

On January 27, 2009, Gates expanded upon his views in an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he has been following up with speeches and testimony ever since. Gates has been accused of applying a scattershot approach to defense cuts without having an overarching strategy. He is also accused of pursuing a “divide and conquer” strategy to silence contractors; they lose work in one program but gain in another, or work is lost in one part of the country but gained in another.

Actually, Gates does have a coherent strategy; whether it is the correct strategy is something reasonable people can and should debate. Similarly, Gates’s approach to weapons systems is far from scattershot; in fact, many of the proposals he is putting forward are no different from those that Don Rumsfeld contemplated early in the Bush administration. The events of 9/11 diverted Rumsfeld from focusing on weapons programs; in his first two years as secretary of defense, Gates likewise left the management of the defense program and budget to his able deputy, Gordon England.

FIRST, HOWEVER, TO THE STRATEGY. It is Gates’s view that the United States will engage in irregular forms of warfare for the foreseeable future. No serious conventional military competitor has emerged on the international scene, and that includes China. Whether in terms of defense spending or in terms of conventional military capability, Gates rightly asserts, the United States military is far and away the most powerful force on the face of the earth.

You can not overstate what a boon to Bill Clinton it was to have the initial peace dividend from the end of the Cold War delivered on his watch, even though he was politically terrified of seeming weak on national security. If Barrack Obama and Secretary Gates continue with the Bush/Rumsfeld vision for reforming the military and wind down the rest of the WoT, this dividend can be almost as helpful.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2009 5:57 AM